This book offers a dynamic theory of law and economics focused on change over time, aimed at avoiding significant systemic risks (like financial crises and climate disruption) and implemented through a systematic analysis of law's economic incentives and how people actually respond to them. This theory offers a new vision of law as fundamentally a macro-level enterprise establishing normative commitments and a framework for numerous private transactions, rather than as an analogue to a market transaction. It explains how neoclassical law and economics sparked decades of deregulation culminating in the 2008 financial collapse. It then shows how economic dynamic theory helps scholars and policymakers make wise choices about how to avoid future catastrophes while keeping open a robust set of economic opportunities, with individual chapters addressing the law and economics of financial regulation, contract, property, intellectual property, antitrust, national security and climate disruption.

A study showing that environmentally beneficial technical innovation would be more effective than economic efficiency as the organizing principle of environmental public policy.

Issues such as the patentability of scientific ideas, the market for organs and open source software are hotly debated and yet poorly understood. In particular, there is a great need for sound economic theorizing on such issues. There is also a need for a clear and concise exposition of the state-of-the-art of the economics of property rights. This book fulfils these various needs.

The Economic Dynamics of Environmental Law proposes an alternative to static efficiency-based analysis and policy prescription, focusing primarily upon the environmental law example. It argues for an approach that takes change over time seriously. In particular, an economic dynamic exists that tends to diminish environmental quality over time, principally through increased consumption and population growth. For that reason environmental policy should compensate for these tendencies by encouraging pro-environmental innovation, which the free market often fails to foster. The literature has blurred attention to the innovation problem by failing to acknowledge the tension between fostering innovation beneficial for the long-term and regulation aimed at short term efficiency. Environmental policy cannot foster innovation by treating each regulatory decision as a separate transaction governed by principles of allocative efficiency. Rather, environmental policy-makers should aim to address this larger picture by securing a sufficient number of environmentally positive decisions to countervail numerous private decisions that tend to degrade the environment. This book employs an institutional economic framework, placing some emphasis on Douglas North's idea of adaptive efficiency, to analyze how to think about the environmental law's economic dynamic. It critiques cost-benefit analysis, emissions trading, and free trade-based restraints on environmental protection. It uses the free market as a model, not of efficiency, but of a dynamic encouraging innovation and adaptation in the face of uncertainty. And it urges consideration of a variety of reforms based on economic dynamic analysis. This book contends that its economic dynamic theory offers a viable alternative to policy prescription based on a neoclassical economic framework in a variety of areas, and includes an application of the theory to the law of regulated industries.

Recent high-profile corporate scandals—such as those involving Enron in the United States, Yukos in Russia, and Livedoor in Japan—demonstrate challenges to legal regulation of business practices in capitalist economies. Setting forth a new analytic framework for understanding these problems, Law and Capitalism examines such contemporary corporate governance crises in six countries, to shed light on the interaction of legal systems and economic change. This provocative book debunks the simplistic view of law’s instrumental function for financial market development and economic growth. Using comparative case studies that address the United States, China, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Russia, Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor argue that a disparate blend of legal and nonlegal mechanisms have supported economic growth around the world. Their groundbreaking findings show that law and markets evolve together in a “rolling relationship,” and legal systems, including those of the most successful economies, therefore differ significantly in their organizational characteristics. Innovative and insightful, Law and Capitalism will change the way lawyers, economists, policy makers, and business leaders think about legal regulation in an increasingly global market for capital and corporate governance.

This book offers a theory of law and economics focused on change over time and aimed at avoiding systemic risks.

Providing another key contribution to the immensely popular field of law and economics, this book, written by the doyen of the history of economic thought in the US, explores the dynamic relationship between economics, law and polity. Combining a selection of old and new essays by Warren J. Samuels that chart a number of key themes, it provides an important commentary on the development of an academic field and demonstrates how policy is structured and manipulated by human social construction. The areas covered include: the role of manufactured belief power the nature and sources of rights the construction of markets by firms and governments and the problem of continuity and change in the form of the question of the selectively defined status quo and its status the absolutist character of government, rights, markets and legal principles and the accepted ideational structure of law. The Legal-Economic Nexus is an essential read both economists and legal professionals as well as those researching the history of economic thought and the social construction of law.